Re: A Proposal For The Addition Of Color-Reactiveness To The GNOME Desktop

[Stephanos Piperoglou <sp249 cam ac uk>]

On Sat, 23 May 1998, Bowie Poag wrote:

> Agreed. However, conceeding this, we shoudln't throw the baby out with the
> bathwater. The best way to implement an "extensible status messaging
> protocol" is via the use of lamps, beacons, and color-reactive elements.
> Only in special cases (such as in color-blindedness) should other
> methodologies be explored. There needs to be a standard; not only for how
> the idea is to be implemented, but also a standard for visual continuity,
> IMHO.

I don't think you'll get many people rooting for this philosophy in the Unix
world. The capability for implementing color-reactiveness, that's a nice
idea. But what you're doing is taking a very general problem (indicating
program status) and giving a very limited solution.

Color-reactiveness in itself is not a part of GNOME. If you're so interested
in it, go write a module for fvwm2 that implements it - it should be simple
enough. What could be a part of GNOME is a general way of programs letting
their environment know what their status is. That can be then indicated in
any way - lamps, bulbs, sirens, status bars, text, braille, whatever. Maybe
the default setup will be to use color reactive lamps. Maybe not. But that
is not the issue here, IMHO.

-- Stephanos Piperoglou -- sp249@cam.ac.uk -------------------
All tribal myths are true, for a given value of `true'.
                         - Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent
------------------------- http://www.thor.cam.ac.uk/~sp249/ --